The Last House on the Beach (1978)

Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Good movie but grossly overrated

Funny, strange, confrontational and subversive, this is one of the most interesting experiences you'll have at the cinema this year.

As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

This may not be quite as explicit or in your face as, 'House at the Edge of the Park', but it is still seriously nasty affair and most compelling. I found the pacing tight and the action fast moving. 'Action', of course includes, stripping, raping and torturing the various youngsters who are in a desolate house practising a play for their catholic church school with their nun. Florinda Bolkan does very well in her role as the nun, at first stoical and gradually coming around to a more vigorous defence of herself and her girls. Ray Lovelock is excellent as the more charismatic of the baddies who intrude upon the ladies, but everybody helps to make this a most entertainingly brutal and sexy outing. 'Guilty pleasure' I think is the apt description.

As successful as Wes Craven's "Last House on the Left" was, it was such an unpleasant and notorious film that it didn't spawn too many imitators in American. Italy, however, was a whole different story, There "Last House" and its home-grown, pseudo-sequel "Late Night Trains" spawned an entire subgenre (albeit a pretty small one) known as the "terror film". These films usually fell into two categories. Some are flat-out sexploitation films like "Terror Express" and "Escape from a Woman's Prison" that are pretty hard to take seriously, where others, like "Late Night Trains", are pretty disturbing but are also usually much more stylized and less graphic than the infamous American film (the one exception to all this was Ruggiero Deodato's "House by the Edge of the Park" which might even be MORE harrowing than the Craven film).This movie falls more into the latter category. It is a more-or-less serious film about three fugitive bank robbers who rape, murder, and generally terrorize a nun and a gaggle of Catholic schoolgirls at an isolated cottage by the beach. The violence is pretty nasty, but not especially graphic. There are three rapes, including a fatal one involving a walking stick, but they are highly stylized and/or take place mostly off camera. There is a general lack of character development,however, so that even the strongest actors like Florinda Bolkan and Ray Lovelock are not as effective as they could have been (having seen "Flavia the Heretic" and "Let Sleeping Corpses Lie" I would have expected more from a face-off between nun-heroine Bolkan and bank robber/villain Lovelock). The girls are all nubile but not particularly young or innocent looking (Sherry Buchanon, for instance, had been playing abused schoolgirls since "What Have They Done to Your Daughters?" in 1974). This is somewhat appropriate, however, since the movie seems unsure at times whether it wants to pity them or sexually exploit them.The ending is interesting although I'm not quite sure what to make of it. Neither the best nor the worst of its kind.

Here's another Last House on the Left cash-in, this one comes from notorious Mondo filmmaker Franco Prosperi.After pulling a bank robbery, three thugs (Ray Lovelock, Flavio Andreini & Stefano Cedrati) seek a place to hide out for awhile. They stumble upon an isolated beach house and decide to crash there for a few days. The house is owned by the nearby Catholic School, and Sister Cristina (Florinda Bolkan) and five of her female students are occupying it for a few days as they study for upcoming exams.The men break in and hold the women hostage, and while searching the house to make sure there's no one else around, one of them comes across a maid hiding in the basement – he slaps her around a bit then caves her head in with an iron, promptly killing her. Another of the men finds one of the girls in the bathroom getting dressed and makes unwanted advances towards her; she swiftly grabs a comb and stabs the pointed handle deep into his leg, crippling him for the remainder of the film.When we meet Sister Cristina she is dressed in civilian clothes but as soon as the men discover she is a nun they force her to undress in front of her students and put her habit on. Later on two of them viciously rape her in the wine cellar. The action pretty much never leaves the interior of the house and moves pretty slow as the men lounge around sunbathing and drinking wine (the wounded one even finds time to read a bit of William Faulkner!?).Eventually the ladies manage to do away with their captors as Sister Cristina gives the wounded man a lethal injection, shoots the 2nd man and one of her students blasts the last thug in the stomach with a shotgun. When he refuses to die all five girls beat him to death with sticks! Overall this flick isn't too nasty, shocking or even that entertaining, especially when compared to some of the far superior Last House knock-offs: House on the Edge of the Park, Last House on Dead End Street, Night Train Murders, etc. Although it does contain a few notable scenes: the creepy slo-mo rape of one of the girls set to a ''trippy'' acid-rock score, the violent - although non-graphic - rape-with-a-stick scene (again in slo-mo), a bizarre scene where the men force the girls to watch naked disco dancing on TV while they molest them (!?), and the aforementioned beaten-to-death-with-sticks scene.Some of you will recognize Florinda Bolkan from Flavia the Heretic, A Lizard in a Woman's Skin or Don't Torture a Duckling, Ray Lovelock from Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, Murder Rock or Autopsy and one of the female students as Susan Kelly from Zombie Holocaust. It also features a fantastic upbeat score from Roberto Pregadio (SS Experiment Camp, White Cannibal Queen, and SS Camp 5: Women's Hell). Recommended to rape / revenge completists and fans of Italian sleaze. 6/10

Sister Cristina(Florinda Bolkan)plays a nun who takes 5 teenage girls in her care to a remote house where they rehearse 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'.Three bank-robbers(Ray Lovelock,Flavio Andreini and Stefano Cedrati)show up,brutally raping and terrorizing the girls,killing one by raping her with a cane,until Bolkan renounces her teachings and seeks bloody revenge."The Last House On the Beach" by Franco Prosperi is a typical Italian exploitation film.There are some nasty scenes of misogynistic sexual violence,but the action is slow and the characters are uninteresting.Still if you like terror cinema you can give this one a look.I still think that Deodato's "House on the Edge of the Park" or Lado's "Late Night Trains" are much more disturbing films.7 out of 10.